Fortney: Creepy clowns a joke to some, a menace to others

He’s entertained generations of kids, bringing laughter and joy to all four quadrants of Calgary.

Recently, though, Kirk Miles hasn’t been feeling the love. “First came the oil crash,” says the 30-year veteran of the local clowning circuit, who performs under the name Hamlet the Clown. “Now there are all these wannabes running around and doing it for free.”

If you haven’t been paying attention to social and mainstream media this past while, you might not know that Miles’s ancient and noble profession has once again become the punching bag — pardon the Bozo pun — of pop culture.

In August, a little boy in North Carolina told his mother he’d seen two big guys dressed as “very scary” clowns standing in a nearby wooded area.

Since then, people dressed in creepy clown costumes have ostensibly been spotted in more than 18 American states; earlier this week, the phenomenon reportedly made its way to Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

It’s not all fun and games: in Edmonton, two teens were charged with uttering online threats on a “creepy clown” Instagram account against staff and students at three schools, prompting two of the schools to go on alert, the third a total lockdown; in Nova Scotia, a 24-year-old male wearing a scary clown mask was arrested for allegedly grabbing at a boy’s clothes.

Some of these malevolent pranksters have been seen holding chains as they stand at the side of the road, others on skateboards, while a few more lurk behind bushes and garbage cans.

A series of photographs of a person dressed as a creepy clown apparently prowling the streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin, is freaking people out, prompting calls to police, according to local news reports.Postmedia Wire

That is if you believe social media, which in the past week has exploded with reports of sightings and videos showing clowns with macabre makeup menacing the public.

Some of them are for real. On Thursday, a remorseful teenage boy attended the Fort Saskatchewan RCMP with his mom to confess to being the culprit locals had earlier spotted in creepy clown attire. The incident prompted the detachment to release a statement, saying that while the youth was not being charged, they were alarmed by his actions. “We just don’t want anyone to get hurt,” wrote Cpl. Jennifer Brown, “the person dressed as a clown, or the public.”

On Friday, Calgary inquiries into the growing phenomenon prompted local law enforcement to issue a short statement: “The Calgary Police Service has received no credible information to indicate a legitimate threat to the safety of the general public in Calgary.”

According to Benjamin Radford, this is a tune we’ve heard before. “In the early 1980s, there were reports coming out of Massachusetts of creepy clowns trying to lure children,” says Radford, author of the new book Bad Clowns, which takes a look at our ambiguous relationship over the centuries with these specialized comic performers.

“These things occur in clusters and they pop every few years,” he says of what he refers to as the “phantom clown” phenomenon. “In this case, children report seeing the creepy clowns, but no adults ever witness it.”

Thanks to social media and its talent for spurring worldwide trends within minutes, this latest incarnation of the creepy clown trend has gone viral in no time.

Radford points to such pop culture references as Stephen King’s Pennywise creepy clown character in the 1980s and, more recently, the supernatural horror flick Clown as keeping our love-hate relationship with clowns on the front burner.

Stephen King’s PennywisePostmedia Wire

This latest wave of sightings, although spurred by what was a phantom clown sighting, falls into what he calls the “stalker clown” category, with mostly male teens the perpetrators.

Radford doesn’t think it’s anything to get too excited about. “If you’re really going to commit a crime, the last thing you’d do right now is dress like a clown,” he says. “This thing will burn out soon, with no lasting damage to the clowning community.”

So why clowns, those rubber-nosed, always smiling modern-day jesters, you ask? Well, according to a survey conducted at Knox College in Illinois, when people were asked to rate the creepiness of a lengthy list of occupations, clowning ranked No. 1.

Rami Nader, a Vancouver psychologist who studies fear of clowns, says it’s not surprising that so many feel ambiguous towards these mischief-makers with oversized shoes.

“It has to do with the fact that clowns have these large, artificial painted expressions. You know that nobody’s happy all the time,” says Nader, director of the North Shore Stress and Anxiety Clinic. “They’re ambiguous because you don’t really know what they’re truly feeling.”

Nader says only about 12 per cent of the population reports being uncomfortable around clowns. “You rarely see anyone coming in for therapy to deal with a fear of clowns, because they’re pretty easy to avoid.”

As a psychologist, he’s more fascinated by, and concerned about, the motivations behind donning a creepy clown outfit and heading out in public. “It’s anti-social behaviour, intentionally causing psychological harm to others,” he says of the perpetrators, many of whom he’d also guess are young males in their teens and early 20s. “They’re thinking it’s funny, without thinking about the impact on others.”

Miles, who also offers a couple of alternative clown personas (Wormblood and Scabz the Clown) for adults, has another theory about why the creepy clown has come back to menace legitimate professionals like him.

“It comes from Rosemary’s Baby,” he says of the 1968 horror flick. “If you can make something as innocent as a baby, or a clown, scary, then it’s double jeopardy for the fright factor.”

While he isn’t planning on joining the more than 100 other clowns at the Clown Lives Matter march in Tucson, Ariz., on Oct. 15 — yes, that’s a real thing happening — he too is fed up with the bad name such pranksters are giving those who earn their living by making kids and grown-up kids laugh.

“Real clowns develop their inner child, not their inner creep,” says Miles. “If you want to go out and scare people before Halloween, dress up like a Zombie. Or better yet, put on an orange wig and pretend to be Donald Trump.”

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